Blog Archives

WASHINGTON – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

“It is one thing to create special rules for national security,” Gertner said. “Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

“Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use “normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD.”

A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.

But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to “recreate” an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said.

“PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION”

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.”

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. “Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day,” one official said. “It’s decades old, a bedrock concept.”

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using “parallel construction” may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.

A QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONALITY

“That’s outrageous,” said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. “It strikes me as indefensible.”

Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin “would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional.”

Lustberg and others said the government’s use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant’s identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.

“You can’t game the system,” said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. “You can’t create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don’t draw the line here, where do you draw it?”

Some lawyers say there can be legitimate reasons for not revealing sources. Robert Spelke, a former prosecutor who spent seven years as a senior DEA lawyer, said some sources are classified. But he also said there are few reasons why unclassified evidence should be concealed at trial.

“It’s a balancing act, and they’ve doing it this way for years,” Spelke said. “Do I think it’s a good way to do it? No, because now that I’m a defense lawyer, I see how difficult it is to challenge.”

CONCEALING A TIP

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

“I was pissed,” the prosecutor said. “Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you’re trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court.” The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.

A senior DEA official said he was not aware of the case but said the agent should not have misled the prosecutor. How often such misdirection occurs is unknown, even to the government; the DEA official said the agency does not track what happens with tips after the SOD sends them to agents in the field.

The SOD’s role providing information to agents isn’t itself a secret. It is briefly mentioned by the DEA in budget documents, albeit without any reference to how that information is used or represented when cases go to court.

The DEA has long publicly touted the SOD’s role in multi-jurisdictional and international investigations, connecting agents in separate cities who may be unwittingly investigating the same target and making sure undercover agents don’t accidentally try to arrest each other.

SOD’S BIG SUCCESSES

The unit also played a major role in a 2008 DEA sting in Thailand against Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; he was sentenced in 2011 to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiring to sell weapons to the Colombian rebel group FARC. The SOD also recently coordinated Project Synergy, a crackdown against manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers of synthetic designer drugs that spanned 35 states and resulted in 227 arrests.

Since its inception, the SOD’s mandate has expanded to include narco-terrorism, organized crime and gangs. A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit’s annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.

Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.

The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.

About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show. They can query it to try to link otherwise disparate clues. Recently, one of the DEA officials said, DICE linked a man who tried to smuggle $100,000 over the U.S. southwest border to a major drug case on the East Coast.

“We use it to connect the dots,” the official said.

“AN AMAZING TOOL”

Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller’s citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.

“They do a pretty good job of screening, but it can be a struggle to know for sure whether the person on a wiretap is American,” the senior law enforcement official said.

Tips from domestic wiretaps typically occur when agents use information gleaned from a court-ordered wiretap in one case to start a second investigation.

As a practical matter, law enforcement agents said they usually don’t worry that SOD’s involvement will be exposed in court. That’s because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement.

Current and former federal agents said SOD tips aren’t always helpful – one estimated their accuracy at 60 percent. But current and former agents said tips have enabled them to catch drug smugglers who might have gotten away.

“It was an amazing tool,” said one recently retired federal agent. “Our big fear was that it wouldn’t stay secret.”

DEA officials said that the SOD process has been reviewed internally. They declined to provide Reuters with a copy of their most recent review.

Both cannot be correct

President Obama at a press conference this morning insisted that high-level national security leaks are not coming from the White House.

“The notion that my White House would purposefully release classified information is offensive,” President Obama said.

But a Republican memo from the Senate Republican Policy Committee maintains that either the president or the New York Times is wrong.

“It would appear the President’s statement and the New York Times statements directly conflict with each other and cannot both be true at the same time,” the memo states.

For proof, the memo highlights Obama’s denial that the White House is responsible for the leaks and certain statements in the Times‘s stories.

“If that statement were meant to serve as a denial that the Obama Administration leaked classified information, it would appear to stand in direct contrast to the New York Times article describing the President’s personal involvement in a process ‘to designate terrorists for kill or capture,'” the memo states. “One of the opening paragraphs described the methodology for compiling the story, saying ‘three dozen’ of the President’s ‘current and former advisers’ were interview sources for the story.”

The memo cites another example that would seem to contradict the president’s statement: “A second story, about cyberattacks on Iran nuclear facilities, citied discussions with ‘officials involved in the program,’ and went on to say that program ‘remains highly classified.'”

“My sources say the next step is to make Gulf governments (their ruling families) figurehead bodies only without actual ruling. The start will be in Kuwait in 2013 and in other Gulf states in 2016,” Khalfan said.

Khalfan sparked a controversy after threatening earlier this month to arrest renowned Islamic scholar and leading Brotherhood figure, Dr Yusuf Al Qaradawi, for criticising the United Arab Emirates for deporting Syrian protesters.

Reacting to the developments in the UAE, Mahmoud Ghazlan, Spokesman of Muslim Brotherhood, condemned the arrest warrant for Dr Al Qaradawi, Head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars.

Challenging the UAE establishment, Ghazlan said: “The United Arab Emirates cannot dare to arrest Sheikh Al Qaradawi. It is just a physiological war and propaganda. The cleric cannot be arrested.”

Meanwhile, the UAE government has asked the Egyptian authorities to explain its stand on the statement of Ghazlan.

Notably, Dr Al Qaradawi recently criticised the decisions of UAE government to cancel the residency permit of Syrian expatriates for staging protests against Syrian regime in Emirates and withdraw the citizenships of six Islamists who were found involved in terrorism funding.

Baker Hughes Incorporated has posted Weekly Rig Count reports to its Investor Relations website according to which the U.S. offshore rig count is up from last week. BHI Rig Count: U.S. -2 to 874 rigs U.S. Rig Count is down 2 rigs from last week to 874, with oil rigs up 5 to 664, gas […]

Exxon Mobil Corporation, an American oil and gas corporation, Friday announced estimated second quarter 2015 earnings of $4.2 billion, compared with $8.8 billion in the same period a year earlier. The U.S. Upstream operations recorded a loss of $47 million, down $1.2 billion from the second quarter of 2014. Non-U.S. Upstream earnings were $2.1 billion, […]

Chevron Corporation, an American multinational energy corporation, Friday reported earnings of $571 million for the second quarter 2015, compared with earnings of $5.7 billion in the same period last year. Included in the quarter were impairments of $1.96 billion and other charges of approximately $670 million relating to project suspensions and adverse tax […]

Afren, an international independent oil exploration and production company, has filed for administration after failing to get support for its refinancing efforts. According to Afren, the recently completed operational review has led the company to expect materially lower near-term production from its assets as compared to the production level assumed in the […]

Awilco Drilling PLC, a UK-based drilling contractor, and Hess Limited have mutually agreed to release the WilHunter semi-submersible rig ahead of the December 1, 2015 contract date as a consequence of the early completion of the decommissioning program. Awilco has said that there will be no negative financial repercussions to either party as a result of this […]

The Offshore Installations (Offshore Safety Directive) (Safety Case etc.) Regulations 2015 (SCR 2015) came into force on July 19, 2015. They are the UK’s response to the EU’s Offshore Directive which was adopted in June 2013. Britain’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) published a new guide to help offshore oil and gas operators to adhere […]

British energy company BG Group, soon to be taken over by Shell in a $70 billion deal, has seen its profit rise in the second quarter of 2015. Namely, BG Group reported that its total earnings for the second quarter of 2015 were $2 225 million compared to $1 367 million in the second quarter […]

The World Bank Thursday approved a $700 million investment in guarantees for Ghana’s Sankofa gas project, located in the Cape Three Points block, 60km offshore Ghana. According to the Washington-based international organization World Bank, Sankofa is a transformational project that will help develop new sources of clean and affordable natural gas for domesti […]

U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources approved Thursday the Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015, and Offshore Production and National Security Act (OPENS), which would ensure Alaska and other coastal states receive a fair share of the revenue from oil and gas activity off their shores. The bill would also lift the ban on […]

Subsea World News has put together a recap of the most interesting articles from the previous week (July 27– August 02). DOF Subsea, a subsidiary of DOF ASA, has reached an agreement with Subsea 7... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The Board of Siem Offshore has decided to appoint Idar Hillersøy as new CEO of the company with effect from August 01. Idar Hillersøy has since April 01, 2015 been responsible for the OSV segment of... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Siemens Energy Management and VBMS (UK) Ltd have been selected by the proposed Navitus Bay wind park as the preferred electrical transmission system supplier. The two companies will come together to... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Stena Line considers the European Commission’s tacit approval of public financing of the Fehmarn Belt fixed rail-road link between Denmark and Germany discriminatory and not in line with EU State aid... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

The Honourable Gail Shea, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of the Environment and Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Tidal Lagoon Power (TLP) has appointed JBA Consulting to undertake flood risk assessment work in relation to their Tidal Lagoon Cardiff project. The Severn Estuary is the focus of Tidal Lagoon... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Jee Ltd has announced a number of key internal promotions to strengthen its capabilities and champion the delivery of projects. The new structure, headed up by Jonathan McGregor, Head of engineering... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer will begin two months of dives using unmanned remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, to explore marine protected areas in the central Pacific Ocean. Starting on Aug. 1,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

JOIDES Resolution research vessel is preparing to take a group of international scientists on a two-month ocean expedition up the coast of Western Australia to drill deep into the seabed, on a... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

America’s first Bachelor of Science in Maritime Technology, offered by Northwestern Michigan College, is to get a special Falcon ROV, Saab Seaeye informed. In what the college says is a pioneering... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Statoil’s active leases in the Gulf of Mexico

This week the eminent New York Times in-house philosopher David Brooks laments that he is “sometimes grumpier when [he] stay[s] at a nice hotel,” as compared with a “budget hotel” where even “the waffle maker in the breakfast area is a treat.” Brooks has said many contentious things in his tenure with the Times, but the insinuation that a waffle maker is eve […]

A recent feature in The New York Times highlights what it describes as the "Dorms You'll Never See on the Campus Tour." These residence halls stand in stark contrast to many of the opulent living situations colleges now use to lure students on campus. "Built in the middle of the last century or even earlier, they have survived to shock an […]

When you're commuting home, you may find yourself with free time and nothing to do but play Candy Crush over and over again. Why not teach yourself how to code instead? That's the idea behind Lrn, a new iOS app that lets you learn the basics of coding in JavaScript — even without an internet connection. Lrn, which just launched Tuesday, condenses t […]

Handy’s third birthday party last month was everything you’d expect from a startup soiree. Twenty- and thirtysomethings crowded the dimly lit bar at Pergola, a Mediterranean spot in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, munching on skewers of free-range chicken and a seemingly endless cascade of spicy meatballs with tzatziki sauce, as a hoodie-clad co-founder boast […]

For a 56th birthday present to himself, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina) took perhaps the most aggressive step yet against the Republican Party's establishment. It marked perhaps the most bombastic challenge to Boehner's leadership, and another point at which long-simmering tensions within the Republican caucus have exploded out into the open. […]

The cost of building a single parking stall in a Seattle residential garage is an estimated $20,000 and $50,000, according to The Stranger. That cost gets passed on to the renters, who can pay $500 more a month in low‐rise apartments, a 2012 Portland, Oregon study found. The GazeBox likely won’t solve these problems, but it might offer an interesting alterna […]

London (AFP) - Tributes poured in Sunday for Cilla Black, the 1960s pop star championed by The Beatles who became one of Britain's best-loved television presenters, following her death at the age of 72.Black's publicist confirmed her death in a brief statement, and media reports citing local police said she passed away at her home in Estepona near […]

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery's outcomes can be manipulate […]

Now that the typical school year is ending, many high school seniors are excited to be heading off to college — but they've still got a few more excruciating weeks left hanging out in their hometowns before school starts.Join the conversation about this story » NOW WATCH: This haunting film called 'Room' has Oscar written all over it […]

Early last month in "Crowdsourcing Police Brutality", we highlighted an ongoing project at The Guardian which is attempting to tally the number of people killed by police in the US during 2015. Use of deadly force by authorities in America has become a hot button issue after several high profile cases involving the death of unarmed black suspects c […]

Submitted by Lee Adler via WallStreetExaminer.com, The headline, fictional, seasonally adjusted (SA) number of initial unemployment claims for last week came in at 267,000. The Wall Street economist crowd consensus guess close to the mark this week, at 272,000. We focus on the trend of the actual data, instead of the seasonally manipulated headline number ex […]

August 2 is the day when Russia celebrates its Airborne Forces, only this year something went very wrong, and it was all caught on tape. As Reuters report, one pilot died and another was injured when a helicopter crashed at an airshow in the Russian region of Ryazan on Sunday. During aerobatics at the event some 200 km (124 miles) south-east of Moscow, an Mi […]

It was almost exactly two years ago, when during China's long-forgotten attempt to actively deleverage its economy (remember that? good times...) we commented on the country's s first attempt to estimate what its local government debt is since June 2011. This is what we said in July 2013: "China is preparing to admit that the level of problem […]

Excerpted from Third Point LLC's letter to investors, Lately, a varied chorus of powerful union bosses, politicians and candidates, an asset management company executive, and a few ivory tower types have asserted that activism is short term in nature, engaged in by “hit and run” investors who care only about making a quick buck while leaving a company […]

Meet 31-year-old Dan Price. Dan is the CEO of Seattle-based credit card payments processing firm Gravity Payments, and three months ago, he did a funny thing. After talking with a friend who confessed to having difficulties making student loan payments and rent each month on an annual salary of $40,000, Dan decided to set a $70,000 per year pay floor at Gra […]

Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com, Anyone with a nose for markets will tell you that the Chinese government's attempt to rescue the country's stock markets from collapse is far from succeeding. Bubbles collapse, period; and government interventions don't stop them. Furthermore, we are beginning to see a crack widen in the foundat […]

Submitted by Mac Slavo of SHTFplan.com Are We Being Forced Into a “Second American Civil War”… If So, Who Will Win? A culture war has been stirred up. Divisions are along predictable lines: racism, police abuse, controversial social issues, and plenty of left vs. right, demographics and regional baggage to clash over as well. And by all accounts, differences […]

Part 4: The State Strikes Back The counterfeiting business, like any other, has fundamental economic constraints. At one end, operators must produce a product. That, in turn requires very specialized equipment and supplies, all of which cost money. The better the product is to be, the more it will cost to produce. In the case of the bills sitting in front of […]

It takes more than raw power to run a successful state; people must believe that laying their wealth at your feet is a righteous thing to do. This week, we'll look at a big part of how this idea came to Europe. Continued from last week... THE RE-CONQUEST The Church was not, however, willing to forgo military power. They knew its importance and wished to […]

Today's excerpt is by Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor. The Sandra Bland arrest video he discusses will – or at least should – outrage anyone who respects justice and decency. The way the officer repeatedly screams, "I'm giving you a lawful order" suggests he defines "lawful" as "subservient to me. […]

Modern technology makes life easier, but it can also change our perception in potentially dangerous ways. For instance, the Internet lets us see news and political commentary from many different perspectives. Intuitively, this might seem positive. We can easily examine various viewpoints and make informed decisions. What really happens, though, is that peopl […]

Due to Obamacare, my health plan has become something other than insurance. It is now, for the most part, nothing other than a wealth transfer scheme to benefit the politically connected over others. In order to identify the difference between health insurance and government-mandated health care coverage, we can look to Human Action, in which Ludwig von Mise […]